Chungking Express

Masterful Hong Kong film-maker Wong Kar Wai understands that love is about the unspoken moments between people, the hidden gestures betraying loneliness. Chungking Express is a unique expression of such notions of love. The film doesn't pretend that love is all-embracing and constant, in the way so many predictable films would suggest. Love, for the protagonists of this film, comes and goes between subtle glances - always elusive. Indeed if a level of contentment can be reached at all for these characters - it is a fleeting moment, a memory of a song, the way that somebody smells. There are so many essential moments in this film - when Dinah Washington's 'What a difference a day makes' plays over two lovers cavorting, the moments when characters talk to inanimate objects to overcome their loss of love, the brief glances between the second policeman and the waitress across the counter of the fast-food restaurant. It has been dismissed as an exercise in style over substance by many, mainly due to the hypnotic way in which the film is shot and the lack of a real story as such. I don't feel the need to defend it from these accusations because the beauty of the film is there on the screen and nothing I have said or could say could really do it justice. It breaks my heart every time.

Takeshi Kaneshiro (House of Flying Daggers) meets Brigitte Lin (Ashes of Time Redux) after a depressing month trying to get over his girlfriend. She has just lost a group of Indians smuggling drugs. He obsesses over her departure and misses on what is right before him. Things don't last forever. The use of frenetic camera shots and flashing lights make this segment a little hard to take, but still satisfying. You can't get caught up in the story because that is not what's important. It's the film itself that is the point. Just when you think something may happen, the story changes.

In the second segment, Tony Leung Chiu Wai (Lust, Caution; Infernal Affairs) loses his girlfriend, too, but doesn't obsess, especially with Faye Wong (2046) available. But, he hardly notices her. She, on the other hand, spends time cleaning and rearranging his apartment without his knowledge.

It is a film for film lovers. The medium is the message. Kar Wai Wong establishes himself as a true master of the art film.

I never thought that a movie that explores loneliness would end up being one of the most charming feel-good movies I've ever seen.

Two stories, two lovelorn cops, two objects of desire: one a big-time heroin dealer in deep trouble with her boss after the cargo disappears, the other a seriously flaky take-out waitress who inadvertently gets hold of the keys to her admirer's apartment, all shot in a breathless kaleidoscope of color and hand-held camera work to create a mesmerizing portrait of Hong Kong in the 1990s.

With the constant use of "California Dreamin" and "Dreams", do you think this is a film about dreams? In some ways, it is, and in other ways it is not.

You have to give this film credit. Besides looking great and just being an overall wonderful movie, there are little things that really stand out in the writing. The "May 1" can idea, with the connection between birthdays and expiration... so clever.

There is something very personal and intimate about this film that I missed the first time I saw it. Chunking was recommended to me by a friend of mine whose opinion I value, so I tried it again - and I believe I got it.

Looking back on many of the romantic films I have enjoyed, I noticed that the main characters are usually women. Even those with men don't delve with any sophistication into the male heartbreak. As a result, I am not sure I know how to properly grieve a failed relationship. LOL.

Here the heroes both suffer from failed relationships. In the first story we don't really see anything of his relationship, we just see that he held on a little too long. More important than the relationship or the reason it didn't work is the aftermath and the acute dysfunction with which he approaches the next. In his first 'May Relationship' he claims the failing was not knowing enough about her so he tries to 'get to know' more about his new 'blonde' love.

In the second story, the cop falls in love with a woman he doesn't even know. How about that for consistency of the way many of us dudes love? When we fall for women, we often fall for the idea of what they represent to us at the beginning rather than the reality of what she is. The shot that Wong Kar-Wai captured in the second cop's apartment in which the heroine hid on the wall in plain sight and the cop looked in the bathroom missing her completely was a fair characterization of the film. --- The male characters fell in love with the idea of a predefined woman and missed, in essence the women that were right under their noses.

Ultimately fascinating.